The theHRvault blog focuses on topics that relate to the workplace, leadership, management, customer service and office politics. I will also be answering readers questions about professional and career development.

Monday, 18 April 2016

It's pretty
amazing how you always hear managers complain about their best employees
leaving, the truth is, the departure of any good employee can be costly and
very disruptive to the company. There
are a number of reasons why employees decide to up and leave the company. Most
of them are not personal, but they are a sign of a poor workplace environment.

Managers have to realise that in most cases employees don't leave the company
but they leave them instead. This can easily be avoided; all that is required
is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager's part.

Here
are the common mistakes that happen in a workplace that cause the employee to
leave:

1.Promotion Issues

Many
employees leave jobs because there is no upward mobility, no matter how hard
they work or how well they succeed, there are no opportunities for advancement
into higher and more demanding positions. Alternatively, when you have worked your tail
off only to get passed over for a promotion that is given to a colleague who is
less qualified or less capable, now that is a massive insult!

No
wonder good people leave.

2.When hard work is not recognised

It's
easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially to the
company's top performers who are highly motivated. Managers to need to
communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good, as for
some might be an incentive while others are public recognition.

When
employees do good work, they should be recognized financially and publicly.
Otherwise, someone else will.

3.Managers don't care about their employees.

Employees
don't need to be friends with their boss but they need to have some sort of a
good working relationship. A majority of employees leave their jobs because the
relationship with their managers is fractured. Smart companies invest in up-skilling their
managers on how to balance being professional and the human relation aspect. This will go a long way in ensuring that bosses
celebrate employees’ success, empathize with those going through hard times,
and challenge people, even when it hurts. Bosses who fail to really care will
always have high turnover rates.

It's
impossible to work for someone eight-plus hours a day when they aren't
personally involved and don't care about anything other than your production
yield.

4.Poor Management

According
to research, one of the major reasons cited in exit interviews is bad
management. Bad management practices deflate employee morale; causes stress and
cost the company more than just the cost of high turnover. Managers need to have sufficient emotional
intelligence and interpersonal skills to manage people; therefore, companies
need to invest in empowering their manager in training soft skills.

5. A Toxic Work
Environment

A
toxic work environment is any job where the work, the atmosphere, the people,
or any combination of those things makes you so dismayed it causes serious
disruptions in your life. Organisations need a workplace culture where people
can unplug and relax, something as seemingly minor as snacks at meetings can
make a big difference, planned social events can also go far to gain employee
loyalty and forestall a toxic work environment.

As a manager, if
you want your best people to stay, you need to think carefully about your
conduct and how you treat your employees.
You need to create an environment that makes them want to work for you.

Tuesday, 5 April 2016

In a study done by Career Builder survey
in 2012, it was reported that 69 percent of employers reported that their
companies have been adversely affected by hiring a wrong person that year, with
41 percent of those businesses estimating the cost to be over $25,000, for
smaller companies where every employee often juggles many important
responsibilities, the cost of bad hire can be even more devastating.

Here
are some of the effects of hiring a wrong person:

The Financial Cost

Making
a wrong appointment not only wastes the company’s time, it costs money because you
are not only paying a salary to someone who can’t perform to your
expectations, but might incur additional training costs and in extreme cases you
may also incur the cost of severance pay where the employee is let go.

The Employee Low
Morale

When
you are spending your time and money trying to correct your mistake of hiring
the wrong person, the rest of your team may become disengaged; it’s difficult
to stay upbeat when one team member requires so much attention or manages
to bring the whole team down. As a
manager you stand a risk of some staff questioning your judgment and will start to doubt the company’s leadership.

The Reputation of the
business

The
company’s reputation can weaken as customers come to realize that the company
is performing below the required standards. Your company brand will be jeopardised
if you continue keeping an unsuitable person in the company.

Managers Lose Time

If you have ever supervised a
poorly performing employee, you know how time-consuming it can be and as a
manager you need to work harder to maintain team moral and make sure that
service delivery is not negatively affected. Your team goals may take longer to
achieve as time is wasted on performance reviews and potentially ‘fixing’
problems that were made.

Rather
than wasting all the time and money making bad recruitment choices, the next
time you need to recruit, make sure of the following: